UK Tester Forums

The 26th Test Management Forum took place on Wednesday 28 July 2010 at the conference centre at Balls's Brothers, Minster Pavement.

The meeting was sponsored by our patrons: SQS UK and Original Software and Tricentis Technology & Consulting and was, as usual, FREE to attend.

PROGRAMME

Susan Windsor, Gerrard Consulting: Getting the best results out of Test Support functions

As Test Managers, we put lots of effort into planning, preparing, executing and reporting our testing. Do we put enough effort into the Test Support functions that may be outside our direct control, but upon which our testing effort is totally dependent? What about Test Environments, test data and tools support, for example? We all know when these are not in place when needed; our testing stalls or our results are invalid. Why don’t we spend more time getting our Test Support requirements correct? Do we get the test environments we deserve as a result?

This session explores what all these Test Support functions are and how we can improve the service we get from our “suppliers”.

Richard Roy, Tricentis: Breaking the mould in Automated Testing

Functional test automation fails due to two problems: The maintenance problem of test scripts/frameworks and the problem of test data. In order to achieve high automation for the functional regression tests both areas, script-maintenance and test data management must be solved. This session will elaborate on how these two seemingly different aspects depend on each other and how some Blue Chip companies have already solved both problems and achieved automation levels beyond 80%.

Jonathan Pearson, Original Software: The Dark Side of Application Quality Management Ten Black Holes to Avoid For Successful Application Delivery

The quality of application delivery is at the heart of many of the challenges faced in IT projects, and this session will review some of the most common pitfalls and pain points that often beset development projects. With the help of Yoda, Obi Wan and others from the Star Wars cast, you will learn how best to avoid these challenges and deliver your projects on time, on budget and most importantly with quality.

James Wilson, Secerno: Why is testing in an Agile with Scrum environment hard? (And what can we do about it?)

James says, "During the last few UKTMF events I have attended Agile with Scrum has come up in a number of presentations and whether people like it or not as a project management methodology it is here to stay. I would like to cover a number of areas that I believe this methodology makes particularly hard for testing teams, including:

• Agile with Scrum fixes the time and normally fixes the cost by virtue of having a fixed team size. When considering the Quality, Cost, Time triangle the only remaining area that can be changed is quality.
• Short sprints where a releasable artefact is required at the end of each sprint makes the following areas of testing difficult as there is typically only a short period of time (days) between development finishing the code changes and the end of the sprint.
  • Soak testing
  • Stress testing
  • Regression Testing

Frank Puranik, iTrinegy: SaaS: Should we be worried?

The Cloud, Infrastructure/Software as a Service, remote hosting, data centre consolidation: they all imply applications' operation across a variety networks, some out of our control. Frank Puranik from iTrinegy will discuss the typical issues with external hosting of applications, the implications for system performance and our performance testing approach.

Michael Blatt, SQS: Performance Testing: A Great Leap Forward?

Has the essence of performance testing changed over time? How was performance testing in 1994, as opposed to 2010? What are the implications for the next decade and what do we need to be doing now to prepare? Michael Blatt from SQS will lead the discussion and make his predictions.